Songkick.com is a web based music startup which from an early age adopted Acceptance tests and Behaviour Driven Development as part of its development cycle. Key to this was the use of the Ruby based BDD framework Cucumber and the idea of working outside in. Having spent more than 2 years growing our system to a healthy 300 feature files we have learnt a lot about Cucumbers use both technically and culturally.

This talk will cover how Cucumber fits into our overall process, how Acceptance tests fit in a rapidly evolving startup environment, how we write acceptance tests and who is involved, how we cope with long build times by scaling our tests over distributed machines, examining the dangers of over reliance on just acceptance tests, evolving developer centric acceptance tests to customer focused language, engendering trust in the acceptance tests and using metrics to help limit the time we spend in the red.

Thanks to our sponsors

Songkick's path down the Cucumber road.

Joseph Wilk is a member of the core development team for Cucumber. He has been developing for the web for 10 years in both big and small companies and as an entrepreneur. After stints working with Java and Python he finally found Ruby.

Songkick.com is a web based music startup which from an early age adopted Acceptance tests and Behaviour Driven Development as part of its development cycle. Key to this was the use of the Ruby based BDD framework Cucumber and the idea of working outside in. Having spent more than 2 years growing our system to a healthy 300 feature files we have learnt a lot about Cucumbers use both technically and culturally.

This talk will cover how Cucumber fits into our overall process, how Acceptance tests fit in a rapidly evolving startup environment, how we write acceptance tests and who is involved, how we cope with long build times by scaling our tests over distributed machines, examining the dangers of over reliance on just acceptance tests, evolving developer centric acceptance tests to customer focused language, engendering trust in the acceptance tests and using metrics to help limit the time we spend in the red.

Thanks to our sponsors

Songkick's path down the Cucumber road.

Joseph Wilk is a member of the core development team for Cucumber. He has been developing for the web for 10 years in both big and small companies and as an entrepreneur. After stints working with Java and Python he finally found Ruby.